Week 48 2012

Tendring Topics.......on line

Essex leads again?

            A low turn-out for he recent elections of Crime and Police Commissioners to oversee the work of Britain’s Police Forces had been expected.   Few people though imagined that it would break all records as the lowest turn-out in any British election ever!  And this was despite the fact that a great many electors didn’t have to actually ‘turn out’ in order to vote!  I didn’t have to.  I vote by post and my voting paper and voting instructions were sent to me a week before the poll, for me to complete and post back at my leisure. 

            The average turn-out nationally was a miserable 14 percent but Essex ‘led’ (or should it be ‘dragged along behind’?) all the rest with the nation’s lowest turn-out of 12.81 percent.  Was it the result of apathy and lack-of-interest or of a conviction that it was an expensive and unnecessary poll, a negation of democracy and localism, and a means of giving one individual in each police authority unprecedented power – and a high salary to match it!   The Home Secretary claimed after the election that November’s short, dark and rainy days were a major cause of the low turn-out.  This hardly affected postal voters and, in any case, the date of the election was chosen by her government, not by us electors.   I reckon that if the ballot paper had included one further question; Do we need an elected Police and Crime Commissioner to oversee the County Police Force? folk would have been queuing up at the polling stations!

            I voted for Independent Linda Belgrove who lives within the Tendring District and who had been a member of the Police Authority that is being replaced by the new post of Commissioner.  She came fourth out of six candidates, but I notice that she was a runner-up in Tendring, Colchester, Chelmsford, Brentwood and Uttlesford which suggests to me that the locality in which each candidate lives had, as one would expect, some effect on the result.  However an even greater effect was that of having the support of a political party machine and it was Conservative Candidate Nick Alston who was successful, though only after electors’ second preferences had been taken into consideration.  He topped the poll in ten of Essex’s fourteen districts and came first with 51,235 votes.  Second came Mick Thwaites, Independent, a former police officer, with 40,132 votes.  The other candidates trailed well behind.

            A bold headline on the front page of the local Daily Gazette, in the same issue that reported the result of the election, highlighted a major problem to which the new Crime and Police Commissioner will need to give his attention; HALF OF CRIMES ARE NOT SOLVED.  The headline relates to Colchester where 449 crimes were reported in the town during September but 208 of them were marked for no further action by the end of the month. There were similar figures for August and those for October were not yet available.

            Discussion about crime deterrence usually focuses on the severity of the punishment for offenders, but I believe that the likelihood or otherwise of being detected is far more important.  Career criminals don’t worry about the punishment when they are confident that they will get away with the crime! The novels of Dickens and his contemporaries suggest that in the days when you could be hanged for stealing a sheep and transported to Australia for petty crime, more sheep were stolen and there was more petty crime per capita than there is today.  When hanging, drawing and quartering was the accepted penalty for treason (a fate comparable in horror only with burning alive for heresy!) there were certainly more plots aiming at the violent overthrow of the monarchy and the government, than there have been in these more humane and enlightened times.

            Get the crime detection rate up to 75 percent or higher and I have no doubt that, whatever penalty is suffered by those convicted, the crime rate will drop like a stone.  No – I have no idea how that can be achieved, but then I wasn’t among those aspiring to be Crime and Police Commissioner.

Economic Family Planning

          I sometimes wonder if the members of David Cameron’s coalition government (with its heavy concentration of millionaires) live in the same world as the rest of us.  Do they ever actually meet ordinary people except, of course, when they want their votes?

Take, for example, Iain Duncan-Smith, the work and pensions secretary.  He has decided that the United Kingdom can no longer afford to pay all the children’s benefits to which large families become entitled.  He has suggested therefore that child allowances should be paid for the first two children of every family but nothing at all for subsequent offspring. He is, I believe, a Roman Catholic. Can he possibly have never met and mixed with the parents of eight, nine or ten children?

He would find that they come in two, quite separate, categories though it is possible for a family to belong to both of them.  One category consists of a single parent or of parents who are feckless and irresponsible. They may have learning difficulties.  One or other, or both, of them may have a drink or a drugs problem (though they probably won’t admit to it).  Their home is likely to be squalid, smelly and poverty-stricken and their children neglected.  It may be that with patient one-to-one education from a dedicated Social Worker or Health Visitor they could, in time, adopt a more responsible life-style – but they certainly won’t think far enough ahead to ask themselves how they are going to feed a third, fourth, fifth or sixth child with no children’s benefit.

The other category consists of those who believe that to limit the family by ‘artificial’ means is in defiance of the will of God.   They may be devout Roman Catholics or describe themselves as fundamentalist Evangelical ‘Bible Christians’.  They may be ultra-orthodox Jews or fundamentalist Muslims.   They are most unlikely to yield to threats to limit child benefit to the first two children.  To do so, they believe, would bring them eternal punishment.

Paying children’s allowance only to the first two children of such families would do little or nothing to limit or reduce their size. It would increase child poverty and child neglect – and would probably increase the number of abortions.  I can’t believe that that is really what Iain Duncan-Smith wants?

An Honour Denied!

          It seems almost incredible that our government should refuse to allow surviving Royal Navy personnel who, in World War II, protected the Arctic convoys conveying vital war materials to our Soviet allies, to accept a medal from the Russian government in appreciation of their services.  To sail round the northern tip of Norway to the Russian port of Archangel  under constant threat of air attack from the Luftwaffe bases along the Norwegian coast and from German U-boats patrolling the North Atlantic, was one of the most perilous and physically demanding tasks undertaken in World War II.  Hundreds of vessels and some 3,000 men were lost in those Arctic waters.  In refusing to permit Clacton octogenarian Fred Henley and some 200 other Naval survivors of the Arctic Convoys accept this thank-you from the Russian government, our government has displayed a meanness of spirit unique among the World War II allies. American, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand veterans of those convoys have already received their Russian medals.  A typically smooth explanation of Britain’s refusal comes from a spokesman for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office:  

‘We very much appreciate the Russian Government’s wish to recognise the brave and valuable service given by veterans of the Arctic Convoys. However the rules on the acceptance of foreign awards clearly state that in order for permission to be given for an award to be accepted, there has to have been specific service to the country concerned and that that service should have taken place within the previous five years.

            The spokesman goes on to say that the award is also ruled out because the veterans concerned had been eligible for a British award for the same service; the World War II ‘Atlantic Star’.  In 2006 an official lapel badge, the ‘Arctic Emblem’ had also been introduced and some 10,000 had been issued   That settles it then.  ‘The rules’ make it quite impossible for these old men, all in their late eighties or nineties, to receive an official thank-you from a grateful Russian government for their part in one of the most arduous and dangerous exercises in World War II.    I hope that I am not being unduly cynical in suggesting that had the USA (or Saudi Arabia for that matter) wished to make a similar gesture for a similar reason, the government would have either changed those ‘rules’ or found some way of getting round them.

            I suspect that the real reason is that our top politicians are old enough to remember the cold war but not the real war of 1939 to 1945. They are reluctant to admit the enormous contribution that the then USSR made to the downfall of the Nazis (80 percent of all German army casualties in World War II were on the Eastern Front!) or the appalling suffering of the Soviet people during the Nazi occupation of much of their country.  Perhaps, of course, some of them don’t even realize that the Russians were our valued allies during those dark years. Old Etonians seem to have gaps in their knowledge of recent history. It’s not so long ago that our Prime Minister imagined that in 1940 we were junior partners of the USA in the struggle against Hitler!   It is no exaggeration to suggest that the outcome of the war against Nazi Germany was finally decided in a great tank battle that raged on the Russian steppe near Kursk in July and August 1943.  It ended in a defeat from which the Nazis never recovered.  The men of the Arctic Convoys ensured that the Soviet Army had the equipment needed to achieve that decisive victory – and to press on to Berlin!

A Church Divided

A somewhat time-worn certificate in my possession declares that Ernest George Hall born on 18^th May 1921, the son of Regimental Sergeant-Major Frederick Charles Hall, was baptised at St. Michael’s Garrison Church, Tidworth on 26^th May 1921. Thus, I have been a member of the Church of England for over 91 years! I certainly can’t claim to have been an active church member for the whole, or even for the greater part, of that time. However I have never formally rejected the Church and, even in the days when I would have described myself as an agnostic, I regarded the Church of England with affection and respect, recalling nostalgically the days when first as a choirboy and later as a server, I had used and loved the liturgies of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.

For well over a decade I have been an occasional attender and communicant at my local Church of England Church, and six years ago I renewed and revived my active membership (well, as active as is possible in my late eighties and early nineties!).  I had never, of course, actually ceased to be a member.

            All of that probably accounts for the deep sadness that I feel about the way in which, in recent years, the Church of England has been torn by controversy, first about the ordination of women priests and, only last week, about the creation of women bishops.  How strange that at that latest Synod, the Bishops, who might have been expected to take a conservative stance, overwhelmingly welcomed the idea of committed women joining their ranks, the clergy accepted it and it was the laity who opposed and – by a majority of just a handful of votes vetoed it!

             Since 1948 I have also been a Quaker. I would certainly never abandon the Christian tradition that, in the silence of its expectant and prayerful Meetings for Worship, brought me back from my sterile agnosticism (I suppose that today it would have been called non-theism) to George Fox’s affirmation, on which the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) is founded, that there is one even Christ Jesus who can speak to thy condition. Consequently I am in dual membership; an unusual but not unique position. Canon Oestreicher of Coventry Cathedral and Terry Waite, Archbishop Runcie’s envoy to the Middle East, who spent several years in captivity as a hostage, are two other – much more distinguished – dual members.

            Quakers do not have a separated professional priesthood and the idea of settling controversial issues by means of a majority vote is alien to the Quaker tradition. We have no fixed liturgy, prayer book or hymn book. We do though have a published booklet of Advices and Queries, revised from time to time, that provides us with a guide, but not a fixed rule, to advise and support us both in worship and in our daily lives.

One of these advices is, I think, particularly relevant to those who hold strong views on either side in the current controversy within the Church of England.

Consider the possibility that you may be mistaken.

I would add that this should be done prayerfully and in the light of the teaching and example of Jesus Christ, rather than that of any other authority.

           

           

             

           

           

           

             

Week 47 2012

Tendring Topics.....on line

Taking a Sledgehammer (if not a Pile-driver!) to crack a nut!

   Last week, a headline of the local Daily Gazette read ‘Use too many black bags and you risk a visit from the recycling snoopers’.  

            In fact there’s no such risk just yet, but the Gazette reports that, ‘From early next year, waste collectors in Colchester will begin using a new hi-tech computer system to log how much waste is left out for them.  Householders repeatedly caught leaving out too much trash in black sacks will get a visit from council wardens to ‘educate’ them on recycling.  Those wardens will go through the household’s black sacks and explain which items could be recycled instead of going into landfill.

            ‘The hope is’, Matthew Young, Head of Waste Services, says, ‘that we educate people and, collectively, the amount of waste going to landfill is cut massively’.

            I applaud Colchester Council’s aims but I can’t help feeling that they could have achieved their objectives much more easily without all the hi-tech computer activities, without having to rummage through other people’s refuse, and without kindergarten style lessons to householders on what can and cannot be recycled.  All of that seems to me like using the latest third-millennium technology plus the techniques of a seedy ‘private eye’ to teach grandmothers how to suck eggs!

            I don’t suppose that the residents of Colchester Borough are markedly different from those of our own neighbouring Tendring District and, in particular, my own town of Clacton-on-Sea.  Driving, cycling or, in my case, mobility-scootering round Clacton’s residential streets on refuse and salvage collection day will reveal a number of households where the Council’s requirements are fulfilled to the letter.  On the boundary of the property will be a black sack containing non-recyclable land-fill waste and a smallish green plastic box with food waste for recycling. These are collected weekly.  There will also be either a larger green plastic box containing plastic bottles and metal food cans, or a red box containing cardboard and paper waste.  These are collected on alternate weeks. Each householder has been supplied with a chart showing which box is to be put out on each particular week.

            There will be a number of properties where there isn’t a red or a green box, either large or small, in sight.  There will though be up to as many as half a dozen filled black plastic bags put out for collection for landfill.  These are the homes of those who don’t co-operate with the council’s scheme, have never done so, and probably have no intention of ever doing so.  It doesn’t take hi-tech equipment to discover them and there really is no point in opening any of those back plastic bags and pointing out which items could have been put out for recycling.  The vast majority of non-co-operating householders know perfectly well what can and what cannot be recycled.  They simply won’t, or perhaps can’t, sort them out, put them in the appropriate box and take them to the boundary of their property on collection day.  It’s far simpler and easier just to put everything in black plastic bags. If the council supplies only one bag for each week, they can buy some more from the nearest supermarket.  They’re not expensive.

            An official should call on each one of those householders and find out why they are not co-operating with the council’s salvage collection scheme.  Some may have a perfectly valid reason.  Sorting out what is salvageable and what isn’t, putting it into the appropriate container and taking the correct filled containers to the property boundary each week will be beyond the capabilities of many elderly or frail people – and our Essex Sunshine Coast has a great number of these.  I am one of them!  By the time I have got the plastic sack and appropriate boxes ready for collection, I am exhausted and incapable of conveying them the few dozen yards to the end of my drive-way. A kind neighbour does so for me.  Not every one is so fortunate.

            Others may find that holding down a job, looking after a home and perhaps bringing up several children, leaves them with neither the time nor the energy to undertake an extra task.  Sorting out the refuse and salvage and taking it to the property boundary would, in their case, be the final straw that would break the camel’s back!  The Council may be able to help some of them by, for instance, arranging for the refuse to be collected from outside the back door instead of the front gate.

            It is those who could co-operate but choose not to on whom local councils should concentrate their efforts, first by persuasion and, if that fails, by rewarding those who co-operate and penalising the others.  Now that, despite talk about empowering local communities, local authorities have become little more than agents of central government, their ability either ‘to wield the stick or offer the carrot’ is probably extremely limited.  Nevertheless, that path – rather than by the hi-tech plus patronising educational efforts being attempted in Colchester – is the only one that can hope to bring the proportion of recyclables to that of land-fill to an acceptable level.

Another ‘Time Traveller’ finds himself in trouble!

          I sometimes feel that I am a kind of Time Traveller, a cheap ‘economy version’ of Dr. Who.  I am a mid-twentieth century man, with mid-twentieth century attitudes and a mid-twentieth century vocabulary, who finds himself in the twenty-first century and sometimes gets into trouble as a result.  As L.P. Hartley says in the first sentence of his novel The Go-Between, ‘The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there’.

            It seems that I am not alone. Tendring Councillor Michael Talbot, the respected leader of the Independent Group on Tendring District Council (although I think several decades younger than me) appears to be a fellow time-traveller. He has got himself into serious trouble by using a phrase that was common enough in the time of my youth, and presumably in his, but is totally taboo in 2012

In a public meeting Mr Talbot used the phrase ‘the n……….in the woodpile’ and thus provoked shock and horror among his fellow councillors and some council officials.  He realized at once that what he had said was unacceptable and apologised to the Meeting, saying ‘It’s an old-fashioned term and I put it down to my age that I used it at all.  I understand that it has caused offence and apologise to all members of the Council for this slip on my part’.

The Daily Gazette explains that the offensive phrase was a figure of speech meaning, ‘a fact of importance that is not disclosed’.  It in fact a phrase that had its origins in the USA and has the wider meaning of an unexpected and usually unpleasant surprise concealed among otherwise harmless or beneficial material. It is similar in meaning to ‘the fly in the ointment’ or ‘the spanner in the works’. I can well understand that it is a phrase that would cause deep offence to black people, but in the 1920s and ‘30s many of us had never met or even seen a black person (I never had until I joined the army) so we used the phrase casually, totally unaware of its offensive and hurtful potential.

Following his immediate verbal apology Mr Talbot sent an email to his fellow-councillors apologising even more profusely for having used ‘what is a quite unacceptable expression regarded as being racist, in the conduct of a public meeting’.

It seems that these apologies were not really enough for Council Leader Neil Stock who had chaired the Meeting.  Calling for Mr Talbot to resign his leadership of the Independent Group he declared that the use of the phrase had left him ‘genuinely stunned’ and said that after the Meeting a Senior Council Officer had remarked that if Tendring had been a London Borough the use of the phrase ‘would not simply have been a matter for the conduct committee, it would have resulted in a full-scale police investigation’. If that is so then we certainly do need Commissioners to make sure that Police get their priorities right!   It seems that, as in my day, there are always a few officials eager to tell influential councillors what they think they would like to hear!

I suppose that Mr Stock’s professed shock and horror couldn’t have had anything to do with Mr Talbot’s earlier criticism of the oafish behaviour of the council’s finance supremo Councillor Peter Halliday whom Neil Stock is supporting as Council Leader when he leaves that post shortly?

‘In days of old, when knights were bold……

            The bad, bold barons of those days could – and did – get away with murder!   Things are different now but one local life-baron does seem to have got away very lightly with some pretty reprehensible activities.

            I have been strongly critical of Lord Hanningfield ever since I started to write Tendring Topics….on line, four years ago.  He was then political leader of the Essex County Council.  I thought that he was pompous, self-important, publicity seeking, always ready to accept graciously any praise accorded to the county council, while hurriedly passing on to someone else any criticism of any of its services, such as – for instance – its failing child protection service. He was always floating brilliant ground-breaking ideas that made headlines in the press but were either wildly expensive, ineffective or unwanted.

            There was the wonderful Essex Bank, for instance, that was going to offer quick and easy finance to Essex businesses.  It turned out to be less helpful than the ordinary commercial banks and was clearly unwanted.  There was the Essex County Council branch office in mainland China that was going to bring vast export orders to Essex firms.   Whatever happened to that, I wonder?  There was the ‘Essex jobs for Essex men and women’ campaign, urging potential employers to employ local staff.  That was followed by the Essex County Council, at Lord Hanningfield’s initiative, outsourcing its IT services to an international enterprise. Its HQ was not only not in Essex but not in the UK!  Members of The County Council’s existing IT staff lost their jobs. Then there was the conference he called of other highway authorities (Essex leads the way!) on combating the effects of hard winters.   The following winter Essex was the very first highway authority to run out of grit and salt!

            It was obvious to me too, that he had a taste for international travel at the tax-payers’ expense.  There was an event in Harwich, Massachusetts to which our Harwich Town Council sent representatives (at economy travel and accommodation rates!).   The County Council, quite unnecessarily, also sent a delegation, headed by Lord Hanningfield.  Its purpose was to encourage businesses in the USA to buy from Essex firms.   They did not travel by the cheapest means and use the most economical accommodation.  Did they bring back any orders?  I never heard of any.  He made similar journeys to China (for the Olympics!), Hong Kong, India, and the West Indies.  All of course were at our expense.

            All this time Lord Hanningfield was attending the House of Lords as a member, and it was in this capacity that Nemesis caught up with him!  In May, 2011 he was prosecuted and found guilty of fiddling his House of Lords expenses to the extent of £14,000 (it was subsequently discovered to be much more than that!) and was sentenced to nine months in gaol.   It was a light sentence and for reasons that have never been made clear, he served only a small part of it.   Shortly after discharge he was re-arrested on suspicion of fiddling his County Council expenses too and released under police bail.  Just last week we learned that no further action was to be taken by the police because of ‘lack of evidence’.  This did mean that all the evidence supplied by Essex County Council was returned to them.  They promptly published details of purchases made on Lord Hanningdale’s corporate credit card, and paid for by the county council, during the last five years of his Lordship’s nine year reign as Leader of the County Council.

            During those five years he spent £286,938 on that credit card – on flights round the world, on luxury hotels and on hospitality in the House of Lords and elsewhere. It was also revealed that the County Council employs three chauffeurs working up to 97 hours a week.   They were often employed to convey the peer to and from his home to the House of Lords!   There was, it appears, no firm policy on the proper use of the chauffeurs and it is difficult, if not impossible, to work out which travel expenses were allowable – and which were not.

            Lord Hanningfield was not the only guilty one.  Senior officers and fellow-councillors must certainly have known of his profligacy – and done nothing about it.  Others took advantage of his generous hospitality (at our expense!).  They must surely bear a share of the guilt.

            I’m not surprised that the present leader of the County Council now wants closure on the past and concentration on the present and future!

           

         

   

  

           

           

           

              

           

  

Week 46 2012

Tendring Topic.....on line

‘They shall not grow old………..’

A Lifetime ago ……….. The last voyage of the SS Scillin

            The SS Scillin was an Italian cargo ship, built in 1903, of some 1,600 tons.  Just seventy years ago, on 13^th November 1942, she was in Tripoli Harbour being loaded with a living cargo of allied prisoners of war to be transported from camps in Libya across the Mediterranean to Italy.  814 prisoners were ordered into her hold which is reported as having been suitable for no more than 300.   There would have been a further 195 but for the vehement protests about the severe overcrowding and insanitary conditions of the prisoners’ accommodation, made by Captain Gilbert a British medical officer

Among the 814 were 50 members of my own regiment, the 67^th Medium Regiment RA. Most of them, like me, were from Ipswich or East Suffolk, were in their early twenties, and had volunteered for the Territorial Army early in 1939.    We had been in action in the Egyptian/Libyan border area since the previous November.  By the end of 1941 we had been involved in a number of successful assaults against German and Italian garrisons in Bardia, Sollum and Wadi Halfaya (Hellfire Pass). In the spring and early summer of 1942 we found ourselves in defensive actions in the desert south and west of Tobruk.  Finally we became part of the Tobruk garrison and were overwhelmed and taken prisoner by Rommel’s Afrikakorps on 21^st June.  My own transportation to POW camps in Italy had been from Benghazi in July on the SS Ravello.  The voyage across the Med. to Taranto had been uneventful and the fact that, after 70 years, I can remember little about it suggests that it can’t have been too awful an experience.

            That of my 50 former comrades in the Scillin was vastly different.  What happened to them, and to all but a handful of the rest of the 814 prisoners crammed into its noisome hold, remained a secret for more than half a century. It was not until 1996 that persistent enquiries by historians and by relatives (among them friends of mine in Ipswich researching the lives of their fathers who had been in my regiment) forced a full revelation from the Ministry of Defence. 

            It transpired that during the night of 14^th November the Scillin was intercepted by the British submarine HMS Sahib.  The submarine surfaced and fired 12 rounds from its 3in deck gun at this unarmed Italian merchant vessel. Ten of these rounds found their target and brought the Scillin to a standstill.   The Sahib then closed to within 750 yards and fired a torpedo at the Scillin’s engine room.  The torpedo did, in fact, explode in the hold and the Scillin sank almost immediately. Only 27 of those 814 prisoners, plus the Scillin’s captain and crew, survived and were picked up by the Sahib.

            At an enquiry the Sahib’s commander (Lt. John Bromage) was cleared of culpability.  He claimed that the Scillin had no lights, had not responded to his initial shelling and had appeared to be heading for Africa.  He had believed it to be carrying Italian troops.

Nor was the Scillin the only Italian vessel to be similarly attacked.  Five other vessels carrying PoWs were attacked by British submarines during 1941 and 1942. These attacks resulted in the deaths from ‘friendly fire’ of a total of 2,000 British and allied PoWs.  It was particularly in  memory of those forgotten 2,000, fifty of whom had been from my regiment and some of whom had been my friends, that I wore my scarlet Flanders poppy on Remembrance Sunday.

A Triumph for Democracy?

          It is said that a somewhat taciturn Scotsman, who had just attended a service at a local church that had a new Minister, was asked what the sermon had been about.  ‘Sin’, he replied.  ‘And what did the Minister have to say about it?’   ‘He was agin it!’

            I feel somewhat like that questioner with regard to the six candidates for the post of Police and Crime Commissioner to the Essex Constabulary, for whom we are all invited to cast our vote on 15^th November. I have already received my ballot paper as I vote by post. I assume that all six applicants are ‘agin’ crime or they’d hardly be standing.   I know their names.  I know that four of them are standing as representatives of political parties (Conservative, Labour, UK Independence Party and English Democrats) and two are Independents.   Apart from what appears to be a political party slogan ‘More Police – Catching Criminals’* after the name of the political party (English Democrats) that candidate Robin  Tilbrook is representing, we know nothing about the candidates other than what we may have seen in the press or on the internet.

            I’m not really blaming the candidates for this.  I daren’t think what delivering an election address to every household in Essex would cost – and the candidates have already had to find £5,000 deposit!  No doubt the government, always ready to save money, declined to go to the expense of a free mail-shot for each candidate!

            To pretend that this election is an exercise in democracy, much less an exercise in the ‘localism’ for which the government claims to be so enthusiastic, is quite ridiculous.  How can one man, or one woman, possibly be able to respond to the needs of residents of a Police Authority Area as large, as populous, and as diverse as Essex?   How can the election of just one person in charge of its police force be, in any sense of the word, ‘democratic’?

            No doubt the old Police Authorities were less than perfect, though I don’t recall hearing very many complaints about them.  There were surely better ways of replacing them than with a single all-powerful individual.  

There was a simple, democratic solution to their replacement that would have empowered local people while saving the government the very considerable expense of this ridiculous election.  Police Authority boundaries coincide with those of County or Unitary Authority.  Why not make the existing democratically elected local authority the Police Authority?  It could perhaps be stipulated that the authority should appoint a Police and Crime Committee of say ten members, representative not of the political parties comprising the council but of the geographical parts of the council’s area?   Then, all voters would have their own member of the Police Committee whom they could contact with regard to policing problems.  Such a system would also have facilitated co-operation between the police and other local authority activities – education and social services for instance.

But we are afflicted with a government convinced that what is best for those living on the other side of the Atlantic must necessarily be best for us. Possibilities other than that of having a single elected commissioner overseeing each constabulary had not, as far as I know, even been considered.  All of this presented me with a dilemma.  If I voted in the election would I be giving support to a process that I believed to be a ridiculously expensive and unnecessary waste of time and money; a cynical negation of the principle of representative democratic control of our Police Services?

 

  My first inclination was to ignore it – or perhaps deliberately spoil my voting paper before posting it back.  Then I realized that although I didn’t know much about the individual candidates, I did know something about the parties that four of them stood for.  Was it just possible that my failure to vote would allow the UKIP candidate, representative of a Party with policies to which I am strongly opposed, to head our Essex Police Force?

            That possibility made me decide that I must vote!  My first choice will be Linda Belgrove, Independent.  She lives in Alresford and is therefore more-or-less local. She was vice-chairman of the Essex Police Authority that is being replaced, so she at least knows what the job is all about.   She has worked for solicitors and has served on the parish council so she is acquainted with the workings of the law and of problems in our area.  She is not the representative of any political party and (this was probably the deciding factor!) on the photographs that I have seen of her in the local press, she has a friendly smile!  I don’t suppose for a moment that she’ll get elected, but I wish her well. 

And my other vote, my second choice in case whoever gets most votes doesn’t get a clear overall majority? I haven’t yet decided.  Perhaps I won’t use it……. or perhaps I will.  I’ll make up my mind just before I slip my voting paper into the envelope provided and post it.

* I'm rather surprised that that was permitted.

Making the most of the Sunshine

            I have no doubt at all that Britain’s best interests lie in developing alternative renewable sources of energy to reduce, and ultimately replace, our reliance on such fossil fuels as coal, gas and oil.  I believe, and the recent great storm affecting North America has strengthened that belief, that neither Middle East terrorism nor ‘the deficit’ but steadily accelerating climate change, is the biggest and most urgent threat to Britain and to the rest of the world of the 21^st century.  The use of fossil fuels, particularly coal, increases that threat.  What’s more, our oil and gas supplies come from notoriously unstable parts of the world and are, in any case, finite.  They will one day – perhaps a few decades, perhaps a century or more ahead – begin to run out and as they do so their price will escalate.

            The production of nuclear energy, although favoured by the government, is – as we have seen in at Chernobyl and, more recently, in Japan – potentially dangerous. Moreover it produces a waste product that remains lethal for centuries, and for which no-one has yet discovered a safe and permanent means of either disposal or storage.

            Safe and infinitely renewable sources of power available to an island nation such as ours lie in the waves that break upon our shores, in the inexorable ebb and flow of the tides, in the wind and in the rays of the sun.  I believe that the power of the waves and of the tides has yet to be fully exploited, but that of the wind and of the sun is currently being harnessed and has infinite further potential for exploitation.

            I am delighted to see the still growing regiment of wind turbines off our north-east Essex coast and have little patience with those who complain they are spoiling the view.  Consider what climatic change, strengthened and accelerated by mankind’s profligate use of fossil fuels, has done for the view of the east coast of the USA!

            A proposal to build on-shore wind turbines never fails to produce local outrage.   They are, and will always be, either too near to people’s homes or alternatively, destroying hitherto unspoilt countryside and a threat to wild life. There was certainly a storm of protest about the proposed provision of wind turbines between Clacton and St Osyth.  Yet now that they are actually in position and operating we hear little about them.  Could it be that they haven’t proved to be quite the noisy, unsightly and health-threatening monsters that protesters had been led to expect?

            Then there’s sunshine – and this really is the Essex Sunshine Coast!   Solar panels have no moving parts so they can’t be noisy. They are effective.  My single solar panel, from which water heated by the sun is circulated in a sealed circuit through my hot water storage cylinder by a pump activated by two small photo-electric cells, supplies nearly all my hot water needs during the summer months.  Winter sunshine preheats the water in the cylinder before it is brought to the required temperature by my gas boiler, and therefore saves money all the year round.

            More ambitious schemes involve virtually covering the sun-side slope of the roof with solar panels that are, in fact, photo-electric cells and convert the sun’s light, rather than its heat, into electric power to be fed back into the national grid, making the householder an actual supplier of electricity.

            I was delighted when I learned that there are plans to provide no less than 40,000 power generating solar panels locally on fields at Chisbon Heath between Great Bentley and St Osyth, and 15,000 at Sladbury’s farm between Holland-on-Sea and Great Holland.  The south-facing solar panels would be no more than three metres off the ground and would be screened from public view by trees and bushes. Together they are expected to produce sufficient electricity to power 4,750 homes.

            There are similar plans further inland.  A £20 million pound solar scheme in Kelvedon will involve 60,000 solar panels and is expected to provide enough power for 7,200 homes.  Wind power we have and solar power is on its way.  If only some practical and economic way can be found to harness the power of the waves that crash on our beaches, Southern East Anglia could be among the leaders of the development of safe and carbon-free means of energy supply.  

Week 45 2012

Tendring Topic.......on Line

Some Real Horror Stories!

Hurricane ‘Sandy’

          When publishing my one successful work of fiction (a ‘horror’ story!) as my blog last week I wrote that there was more than enough real horror in today’s world without my adding to it from my imagination!  Events have certainly proved me right.  In the past, when there have been official warnings of doom and disaster to come, the reality has often turned out to be something of an anticlimax.   The flooding of New Orleans in 2005 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina was something of an exception.  Its appalling effects were restricted in area though and they were made worse by the lack of effective leadership by US President Bush.

            Hurricane Sandy that struck the USA just a week ago, was most certainly an exception. It was far worse than had been expected by the experts – and their expectations had been pretty dire!   An area of the north-eastern USA larger than the whole of Europe, reaching up to and beyond the Canadian border, was affected.  Millions of homes were damaged and/or had their electricity supply cut off, and hundreds of thousands of people rendered at least temporarily homeless. The centre of New York City and other towns on the Atlantic coast were flooded by a tidal surge made even worse by hurricane strength winds and torrential rain, trees were brought down, public and private buildings alike were wrecked.  Heavy unseasonal snowfall compounded the misery in northern parts of the affected area. It has been estimated the cost of the damage will run to tens of billions of dollars.

            Loss of life was mercifully low, probably less than 100 victims, largely due to the dire warnings, backed by President Obama personally, and sound advice given over and over again on radio and tv.  It will surely be weeks though before life gets back to any semblance of normality for thousands of people.  No electric power means that there are no lifts (I think the Americans call them ‘elevators’). Imagine the plight of someone like myself, with very limited mobility, marooned indefinitely in an apartment on an upper floor of a skyscraper! 

            We have become accustomed to similar disasters (though on a smaller scale) in central America, the Caribbean, the Indian Subcontinent and south-east Asia – but not in an area that many see as representing the very highest standard of living that modern civilisation has to offer!

            Despite the tremendous achievements of mankind in the past two centuries and the phenomenal progress of our scientific knowledge and understanding of the forces of nature, Hurricane Sandy reveals humankind as impotent and powerless when those forces are ranged against us.

            Was Hurricane Sandy, and the other extreme examples of drought, storm and flood that we are now experiencing every year, even in our own country, the result of global climatic change, global warming?  I firmly believe that they were and I believe furthermore that these changes are being brought about, or at least made worse, by human activity. 

            If these increasingly frequent catastrophes can finally persuade the climate-change deniers (including our Clacton-on-Sea M.P.!) of the reality of world climatic change, and the need for urgent action to counter its effects to take priority over all other national and international concerns, then those world-wide who have suffered from them will not have done so in vain.

A Horror closer to Home!

            Much closer to home are the still-developing ramifications of the scandal concerning the late Jimmy Savile. There now seems little doubt that this almost universally popular tv personality, honoured by the Queen and the Pope for his fund-raising and practical service to hospitals and for charitable causes was, in fact, for many years a predatory paedophile, corrupting and contaminating other people as he pursued his pernicious activities.

            Who knew what, and when, and what if anything did they do about it? This is the subject of police investigation, and of internal investigations within the BBC, famous hospitals, and other honoured and respected institutions.  Other celebrities from the ‘pop’ world and the world of politics are being investigated.  As I write two other arrests have been made and more are anticipated.

         

          I hope that Jimmy Savile’s victims, especially those who summoned up the courage to complain but had their complaints ignored or discounted, will find satisfaction in the final outcome of all the current probing.  One regrettable result of the scandal has been to make it possible for rubbishy publications like the Sun, the flagship of the remaining Murdoch Media Empire, to pour scorn on the BBC, an all-British institution of which most of us want to be proud. However the BBC has weathered storms before and I have no doubt that it will, in the end, weather this one.

            Another sad effect is the way in which it will deepen the atmosphere of suspicion with which adult males are regarded when in the company of the young.  Like many old people I find myself attracted to young children.  I like to hear their happy and spontaneous laughter.   It is a joy to see them happily at play.  Yet nowadays I would hesitate to watch children at play on the beach or at a public playground for more than two or three minutes.  I would be afraid of a plain clothes police officer arriving and inviting me to step down to the nearest Police Station and answer a few questions!  

            The Jimmy Savile affair also illustrates how very difficult it can be to pursue resolutely and disinterestedly, an allegation of criminality made against a well-loved celebrity.  In the USA many people believe that such a celebrity may have literally ‘got away with murder’ when, despite overwhelming evidence, a jury acquitted him.

            We hope that couldn’t possibly happen in the UK, but we have seen celebrities acquitted of fraudulent tax evasion by persuading a judge and jury either that they were too other-worldly to have thought about sordid financial matters, or that in all matters other than the narrow one that made their fortunes, they have ‘severe learning difficulties’    Funny thing – one never hears of celebrities being so other-worldly or so dim-witted as to unintentionally pay the Inland Revenue a million or so more than they owe!

Government policies promise horrors yet to come.

-  In the field of ‘Defence’

I don’t think that one needs to be a member of CND or a supporter of the Peace Movement, to believe that devoting another few million pounds to the continued use of those totally useless Trident submarines – while leaving the UK without an aircraft carrier and cutting down the conventional forces that still have unfinished (and never to be finished) business in Afghanistan, is an act of utmost folly.

             Foreign Secretary Hague keeps making bellicose noises against the government of Syria and the Prime Minister is sending war planes to the Middle East to threaten Iran!  Yet Cameron & Co have systematically run down the conventional armed forces that could have backed their bluster while finding millions to support a ‘deterrent’ that we have had for years, that has not as yet deterred anyone and that, if it were ever to be used, would inevitably result in an incalculable number of deaths and the end of civilisation on this planet; Mutually Assured Destruction or M.A.D. (mad indeed!)

- In the field of Planning and Building

The government has decreed that, in order to give a boost to the building industry, create more jobs and provide much-needed homes, the planning laws are to be relaxed.  There is to be a presumption of acceptance of developers’ plans and planning permission will no longer be required for building extensions to homes or structures in back gardens.          

 Building Regulations are also to be relaxed, including those relating to fire precautions and to disabled access.  This is described as cutting through pettifogging red tape and allowing the wealth-creating entrepreneurs to get on with their task of creating wealth for themselves and, purely incidentally and if circumstances permit, serving the needs of the public.

What it will do is create ready-made slums of jerry-built badly insulated buildings, subject to fire risk and threat of flooding, and inaccessible to wheelchair users (so much for the new deal for the disabled that was supposed to be a legacy of the Paralympics!)  It is a step towards making Britain a land of slums comparable with those of the Britain of Victorian times, and of many Asian and South American cities today, and with run-down trailer parks for drifters and missfits on their outskirts, like many cities of the USA.

Add to this either departure from the European Union or ‘repatriation’ of health, safety and labour protection laws ‘imposed by Brussels’, and we’ll have a developers’ paradise and a  positive move towards making the UK ‘competitive in the Global Market’.   Shame about the poor – but David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ will surely see to it that there are sufficient soup runs, food banks and charity handouts, to make sure that very few of them will actually starve or freeze to death.

The American Presidential Election

I am very pleased that Barak Obama won the American Presidential Election.  I am sure that that is good news for both the USA and the rest of the world.

However I have had first the radio and then tv switched on to BBC programmes from 5.00 am till 7.30 am (with a half-hour break for wash, shave and shower) and have heard nothing else.  Surely that can't be all that happened in the world and, in particular, on this side of the Atlantic, in the past twenty-four hours!